employment contracts

We are trying to get more guards for the summer, so we are going to offer our lifeguard class at a major discount. In order to do this, the student must sign a contract that they will agree to work for us for 4 months or 160 hours to get their money back. Does anyone do something similar, and if so, do you have a contract that I could take a look at?

Replies to This Discussion

I am currently running a $50 guard class that I'm teaching. I'm salary and with the certification costing $35, I'm certainly not making any money. I didn't buy the books and told everyone they needed a laptop, cell phone or ereader for class to view the guard book.

For me the idea of charging someone $200+ for a guard class does no one any good. The people who I really want to work for me probably can't afford it before they are guaranteed a job and honestly what pool in the country has TOO many guard applications? I've certainly never worked at one. So I have 11 in this class and I'll probably hire all but 3 of them in some capacity.

Jake I 110% agree with you. What good does it do to skim a bunch of money off these kids. I want the kids that are hungry for jobs, that have had to fight for everything in life and are going to come to work hungry.

What happens if the kid who takes the class for $50 bucks but is not someone you want to hire (you know who I'm talking about too) is at the lake this summer and saves some kid because of what they took from you?

I got tired of providing subsidized training for other agencies so I started charging $100 + books, supplies and red cross fees. If they pass, tryout for our agency and accept employment if it is offered I refund $50. It has worked wonderfully. I intend on either purchasing enough books to library them or downloading and printing them and loaning printed copies to the students. I tried the route of leaving it up to the students in December and it did not work (the electronic files are enormous and take forever to use).

We do a similar program where those interested in working for use after the class pay a reduced course rate and sign a Lifeguard Agreement. If we hire said "potential" employee after class and they work 90 days and are in good standing, we refund them $75. If the "potential" employee is offered a job after class and they decline the job opportunity, we bill them the remaining balance of the general public cost. We have seen this work well over the years, but you always run into trouble with 1 or 2 people that they to cheat the system. I can send you a copy of our Lifeguard Agreement if you would like.

We went ahead and made a one-time purchase on the books so that we could library them (we use them for in-services anyway). This "trade-off" allowed us to basically make the cost of the class the same as the book cost (which we are not including in their registration prices) is $32 and the AP fee is $35. It costs our Department $3 per student more, but since we own all of our other training equipment it ends up being a wash basically. There are other agencies in our area that are charging upwards of $400 for classes!!!! I noticed a HUGE advantage to our situation right away and by continuing to offer the course for $130/$140 we have started to significantly increase our enrollments -and- as was said below, we can have the "cream of the crop" when making hiring decisions. Sorry that this does not help with your original question about a contract, but I wanted to reiterate the "library" strategy. I cannot count on 12-20 teenagers (depending on class size) to stay on focus (unfortunately) when I am asking them to read a lifeguarding manual through their iPhone! Having the physical book there lets us know that they are where we want them to be, and in the end, they have to sign the book back in, if they do not, we send them an invoice for the amount of the book. - Just my two cents! Good Luck with everything!

We took this a step further and sent the electronic version of the manual to our local printers and they printed black&white copies of the manuals for less then $10 per manual, spiral bound. We library books as well and we have found that has been very productive for us.